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The errors, the bugs, the flaws, oh god, they're everywhere. In number and in menace, they drown out the game’s zombies. They’ll become your biggest fear. But instead of eating away at your brains, they’ll instead devour any interest you once had.

The car won’t drive anymore -- you'll have to ditch it. You strain your eyes to seek her out, but the snow makes it hard to see. Cheryl is out there, somewhere in the whiteness. She’s a little girl lost, drowning in a sea of powder: The lonely resort town of Silent Hill has claimed her.

The latest lovely hidden object/adventure hybrid is The Tiny Bang Story - and, frustratingly, it gets the mix half-right. It’s evocative, painting a world that seems to spring more and more to life the further you progress into the game. But it falls into some of the classic traps that both adventures and hidden object games have succumbed to over the years, and the result is a game I wish I could recommend more than I’m about to.

Lovecraft always waxed poetic about dangers “not to be met or dealt with, but only to be fled from as precipitately as possible.” None of his scholarly protagonists ever kicked Dagon's ass, or put buckshot into any of the Deep Ones. But that is what this game expects of us.

As you run around each gorgeous environment, admiring the dense foliage or the imposing brambles or the stone walls or whatever else, the path ahead of you fills in abruptly. Tiles fly up from beneath the screen, as if drawn to you like magnets. It’s an interesting dynamic to see in action, distracting at first before soon becoming intuitive. Pathways prevent you from wandering too far off the beaten path—because you really can’t—and they give the world its own identity. To an extent, it feels like you’re truly living through an apocalypse.

Perhaps I betrayed they who trusted me the most. Maybe I delighted in the slaughter of those who stood in my way and maybe, when my strategies hit a speed bump, I manipulated the field to my liking. Maybe I broke more hearts than defensive walls, but I crossed that finish line first.

Weapon selection isn’t all there is to the combat, though. Each character can master specialized skills that you can then use profusely. A skill requires a bit of focus from your meter, but you can swiftly refill that meter simply by hitting your adversaries with a few standard shots or strikes. The result is that it’s entirely feasible to roll through the whole game using the “fun” moves almost exclusively. Yet you can also roll out of the way of incoming targets, block sword strokes and projectiles and even heal yourself.

From malevolent children bearing bows and arrows and the inexorable presence of a giant spider early on, to crushing gears and high-voltage surfaces in later industrial-themed levels—everything is beset upon you to bring about your ruin. You will be skewered, bludgeoned, electrocuted, decapitated. And you’ll get used to it. It's a small price to pay to learn, to see what comes next.

Some stages have a strict time limit, forcing you to sprint from gem to gem while hoping your speed can keep you out of the way of all those boulders you're dislodging as you wildly progress. Others are designed to make you think a little bit by giving you doors to unlock, one-way doors and warps; while placing you in a more maze-like environment. You might have a bit more time to reach the exit, but you'll have to make good use of it in order to figure out how to snare all the gems.

Whenever I thought a particular ordeal wasn't too tough, it seemed like it wouldn't take long for me to have to face a tougher version of it...likely with some sort of instant-death trap added to the mix in order to provide a bit of extra pressure. I'd need split second timing to outrace a series of propelled spiked walls. Or bounce from one flying car to the next, occasionally 'sploding on a barrel so it could propel me to the next group of vehicles (as opposed to meeting my demise courtesy of one obstacle or another). Or any number of other tasks.

Faulty cooperative AI is usually where I draw the line. If I can't work with a game without talking down to it, then it's just not worth my time. I learned that when I played Brute Force. Yet, I still wanted to give The Magic Obelisk the benefit of the doubt and try to make it all the way through.

Following the closure of his last case, Nelson Tethers is racked with guilt over the string of unsolved disappearances in the eerie, insular community of Scoggins, Minnesota. And so, after taking vacation from his job as an FBI Puzzle Detective, our protagonist fires up his snowmobile and treks back to tie up any loose ends.

Young gamers, and perhaps those who are new to the point-and-click adventure genre, would find a lot to enjoy here – it is obviously marketed towards these audiences, and the developers succeeded in delivering a great product for them.

The Witcher 2 doesn’t stop with waterfalls and ferns, though, or even with prostitutes and foul-mouthed dwarves and snide noblemen. It paints this fantastic world full of complicated people and it lets you interact with all of that in such a way that eventually, like Geralt himself, you are unable to continue as a passive observer. You have a stake in what happens to the people around you, a position in the middle of all of it that you chose for yourself through your prior actions.

You'll kill soldiers with one swing and take down buildings with just a bit of effort. It's hilariously overpowered, crumbling concrete walls like they were made of styrofoam. In third-person over-the-shoulder shooters, it's rare that a melee weapon is this indispensable. You won't mind that the game forces you to hold it at all times, as there's something indubitably MANLY about running up to things and effortlessly destroying them by swinging a mighty hammer of the gods.

Most screens have some combination of hazards for you to contend with: perhaps you'll have to swing across water on a vine while making sure you don't land on a barrel. Or that pond might contain a trio of alligators. You'll have to jump from one head to the next, making sure you're not on their mouth when it opens. Some ponds and quicksand pits are, I guess, magical and will appear and disappear. When they vanish, you can run across the screen safely, but if they return and you're in their part of the screen, you die.